The Invisible Girl
by Arshia Eghbali ︎︎︎The room is almost square except for a chamfered corner long enough for a generously sized desk to be placed there. Hanna is sitting at the desk and is having her dinner. There is a small table in the kitchen and even a spacious dining room in the apartment, but she always eats in her room. To be precise, she prefers doing so since the time she was reading in the living room and her landlord suddenly came up to her and told Hanna that she didn’t want her to use the living room and that she meant it to be only for her daughter and herself. Hanna doesn’t even have a real rental contract—she pays her rent in cash—so she didn’t argue. She just nodded, closed her book, and went to her room. Since then, she understood that she needed to be invisible, and she decided to implement her “leave-no-trace” technic. That’s why she eats in her bedroom behind the desk, and she minimizes her presence at the apartment. That’s also why she keeps all her kitchen stuff and bathroom stuff in the drawers opposite her bed. The chest of drawers is a simple white one (probably IKEA), just like the white walls, the white doors, the white window frames, the white bed, and the white desk. It’s indeed too white a room. Hanna has tried to give it a bit of color by putting up little pictures and decorations here and there. But the whiteness is overpowering. It sucks the color out of everything. Hanna herself has grown really pale. She looks somewhat like a ghost. She moves like a ghost too. Every time she leaves her room to go to the bathroom or the kitchen, or to leave for work, she is careful not to make the slightest noise. She has learned to simply hover above the ground. Whenever she cooks something in the kitchen, she doesn’t leave any smell or any dirty dishes. That’s mainly because she cooks her invisible meals without using any ingredients or pots and pans—which is of course very convenient, since her job as a fulltime intern is an unpaid one and so she can’t afford buying groceries. Hanna has found out that being a ghost has its own advantages: you don’t disturb the white calm of rooms, you don’t need much to eat, and no one will be bothered by your existence while you pay them rent or work for them as an unpaid intern.